For The People

Chapter 5

1970‒1

When Hornlee was being built on the eastern outskirts of Knysna, Owéna was working on the opposite side of town in an outlying area called Rheenendal. There she looked after the welfare of a small coloured community, mainly labourers on the surrounding farms and timber plantations.

Situated outside the municipal boundaries of Knysna, Rheenendal was never declared white under the Group Areas Act – and so the coloured families in the area could stay in their homes, many of them living on their white employers’ farms.

Owéna’s work saw her visiting families and running activities for pre-school children and the elderly. Occasionally she had to deal with a case of alcohol or child abuse, the two often going hand in hand. But generally the people of Rheenendal were happy, and Owéna found her new job less challenging than she’d feared.

On the other side of town, however, her coloured colleagues knew there were much more challenging times ahead.

In 1970, many of Knysna’s coloured families lived in Salt River, a quiet riverside area where over three hundred coloured families and a handful of black families hired plots of various sizes from the Anglican Church, which owned the land. The people lived in houses that in many cases had been built by their parents or their grandparents before them, and would be passed on to their children when they died.

Some of the houses were built from bricks, others from wood and iron. But all of them were big family homes with ample space for mothers to grow vegetables, fathers to keep cattle and children to play.

The families lived simple lives in Salt River, but it was home. Everything they needed was right there, including a church and a few small schools.

One of those schools was started by a man named Percy Mdala, a teacher so adamant that children should get a decent education that he went from door to door convincing parents of the fact. When it rained and the children complained they couldn’t get to school across the swollen river, Mr Mdala went to the river himself, rolled up his trousers and carried the children over one by one.

Although Knysna itself was mainly white, a scattering of coloured families lived there too, mainly schoolteachers, headmasters and shopkeepers.

Wherever they lived, in August 1970 each coloured family in the Knysna area was given a notice confirming what they had known for a while was coming, but hoped never would.

Headed ‘Notice to Terminate Occupation in a Group Area’, it came from the Department of Community Development, the government department dealing with housing for the coloured people of South Africa.

At the top of the page was the South African crest with its antelope and its Afrikaner ox wagon, under which it was declared in English, Afrikaans and no uncertain terms that the area the recipient lived in had been ‘declared for occupation by members of the White group’. As the coloured people were not members of the ‘White group’, it would become illegal for them to live on the land their home was on from a certain date.

For the people of Salt River, that date was October 1971.

In town, the coloured home-owners were also given notice to move. The government arranged for their homes to be valued and the families received whatever amount the valuators decided on, with no room for negotiation.

By the specified dates, the people had to move to the township. There they would be given new homes as part of a low-cost housing scheme, unless they could afford to buy their own land and build on it at their own expense.

Owéna’s colleagues were some of the fortunate ones who could afford to build large family homes in the higher-lying parts of the township that overlooked the Knysna Lagoon.

But on the other side of the hill, rows upon rows of low-cost houses were being built in a damp basin on uneven ground.

Hornlee, or ‘Bigai’ as it was originally known, had first been proclaimed Knysna’s official coloured area more than ten years before.

Almost immediately, the coloured people voiced their concern.

The area was far too small for the twelve thousand people who would have to move there, they said. The topography would make building extremely difficult. The damp could make the area a breeding ground for tuberculosis, already a serious problem in their community. And it was far away from town, where most of the men and women worked.

They would only accept the new township if it were spread over a wider area, they said.

The authorities took note of the request and when the township was finally built, they allocated some extra land to allow for future expansion. That included a piece of land originally belonging to a man called Thomas Horn, and Bigai became Hornlee.

When the deadline for moving came and went in 1971, several of Knysna’s coloured families were still in their old homes. Most of them couldn’t move even if they wanted to. The low-cost section of the township still wasn’t finished, so that they had to wait for houses to become available.

Those who had been able to buy their own land in the township had other issues. Having paid for their plots, many of them now couldn’t afford to build a house on it.

Families who couldn’t move for the time being had to get special permits to stay in their current homes, as once the areas were officially white, the only coloured people who were legally allowed to be there were live-in housemaids. Those maids had to stay in servants’ quarters, usually a small room with its own bathroom, separate from their employer’s main house.

Under strict apartheid legislation, housemaids’ families were not allowed to stay with them in the servants’ quarters. But not everyone complied with the rules. One white man in Knysna allowed his live-in maid’s husband to stay with her. A neighbour took exception and wrote to the authorities to complain, saying it was ‘like a non-white township’ next door. Despite the white employer’s protests and appeals, his maid’s husband was eventually evicted.

Like many other men in the same position, the husband would have had to put his name down for a house in Bigai. And when those men, along with the rest of the coloured community, finally started moving into their new homes, Owéna’s colleagues had their hands full.

The low-cost houses were a fraction of the size of the homes the families had left behind. On the upside, there was hot running water and electricity. Even the bucket toilets were a step up from the ‘long-drops’ most of them were used to, as the buckets were emptied and the waste removed by the municipality each night.

But the floors of the houses were bare cement and there were no inside doors. The soil quality was poor and the ground was uneven so that water came in under the front doors when it rained. Houses were packed in alongside each other with virtually no land in between.

Next-door neighbours could hear every word of every domestic argument and every sob of every screaming child.

Whereas many families had previously managed to live off their land, eating and selling their own vegetables and keeping livestock for milk, butter and meat, they now had no space for vegetable gardens or cattle. And having to pay rent and rates for services meant people had money problems that they’d never known before.

The houses were so small that many parents had to sleep in the same room as their children. As a result, the children saw and heard things that normally would have happened behind closed doors. Marriages were put under strain, husbands started drinking, and children refused to go to school.

While Owéna’s colleagues dealt with those issues, she looked after her coloured community in Rheenendal where, unaffected by the Group Areas Act, people continued to live their lives as before.

She heard stories from her colleagues about the difficulties in the township, but the reality didn’t sink in. Not until a work trip with her colleagues finally opened her eyes to the other side of apartheid South Africa.

It was a national conference that took Owéna and two of her coloured colleagues to Port Elizabeth, South Africa’s self-styled ‘friendly city’.

As the event ran over two days, they were spending the night in a business hotel; nothing too fancy for the cash-strapped Child Welfare.

Owéna and her colleagues were given adjacent rooms on the third floor. Owéna thought nothing of it, but her colleagues knew this arrangement was the exception rather than the rule. The only reason they were even allowed to stay in the same hotel – never mind on the same floor – was because that particular hotel had a special ‘international licence’ that allowed it to admit people of different races.

That evening, the three social workers went out to find a place to eat. Walking along the beachfront, they spotted a cosy-looking Italian restaurant with sea views.

Owéna walked towards the open front door, but her colleagues didn’t follow. They couldn’t, they said. It was a white restaurant.

Owéna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. With her white upbringing and her white education and her white friends, she had never realised the extent of the discrimination against coloured people. If there were never any brown faces in the restaurants she went to, she’d assumed it was because coloured people chose not to go there.

Looking through the window of that restaurant in Port Elizabeth, she realised for the first time that choice had nothing to do with it.

She carried on walking with her colleagues until eventually they found a restaurant where they could all eat together: a curry house run by Indians, far away from the beach.

Chapter 6

Colourful stories

If there’s anyone who’ll tell me a vivid story of life as a coloured person in South Africa, it’s my mother’s boss, Vivien Paremoer.

I drive to her and my mother’s office at Epilepsy South Africa’s ‘residential care facility’ in Knysna; a home where people with epilepsy and other disabilities are given care around the clock.

The home is at the top of a hill, where it’s flanked by a black township on the one side and the local prison on the other. The residents, like their neighbours in the township and the prison, have a spectacular view of the Knysna Lagoon.

I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable coming up here, and ashamed because of it. The residents are all adults, but many of them have the mental age of children and the emotional neediness that goes with it. I never know quite how to deal with them.

There’s a big security gate that’s looking worse for wear. I have to lean out of my car window to push an intercom button on a rickety post and announce my arrival to a voice so scratchy I can barely hear it.

The gate slides open.

I find Vivien in her office, where I greet her with a ‘Hallo, Tannie Vivien.’

Like all Afrikaans children, I was taught to call adults Tannie (auntie) and Oom (uncle) out of respect, whether they were related to me or not. Even now that I’m in my thirties, Vivien will always be Tannie to me.

Vivien and my mother first worked together years ago at Child Welfare, where they were both social workers. It was my mother who talked Vivien into taking the job as branch director at Epilepsy South Africa, when what Vivien actually wanted to do was retire.

To say thank-you for seeing me, I give Vivien a packet of rusks from a batch I baked yesterday. A type of South African biscuit, rusks are much like Italian biscotti: long, dry fingers designed for dunking in coffee or tea. I’ve packed them in neat rows in a clear plastic bag that I’ve tied with red wool.

‘Just like your mother,’ says Vivien.

Although she and my mother go back as far as I can remember, I don’t actually know much about Vivien at all. It’s only in the last week that I found out her family has always lived in Knysna, even before Hornlee was built. I’ve also found out that her family was one of those who were removed from their homes because of the Group Areas Act.

That’s the story I’m here for.

I ask Vivien about growing up in Knysna and she soon puts me right. She didn’t spend much of her childhood here, she says. Her parents, both teachers, sent her and her sister away to Cape Town when she was five years old.

It was the 1960s and Vivien’s parents were teaching at one of Knysna’s small farm schools – back then, the only places for the local coloured and black children to go if they wanted any kind of education in Knysna. The classes were big and the children in Sub A and Sub B – now grade one and grade two – were all together in one class with just one teacher.

Vivien’s parents, wanting a better education for their daughters, sent the two girls to stay with their grandmother in Cape Town where they were enrolled in a ‘proper’ primary school. It was still a coloured school – ‘I never went to a school in my life where there were white children too,’ says Vivien – but it was a decent urban school, much bigger and more structured than Knysna’s farm schools. The school was in a suburb of Cape Town, where Vivien’s grandmother rented a big house. Eventually six of Vivien’s uncles and aunts moved in too, but still there was room enough for everyone.

Until they had to move.

Not long after Vivien got there, her grandmother was told that Parow had been proclaimed a white area and she and her family had to move to a coloured township. There, they were given a small, cramped house under the government-subsidized or ‘sub-economic’ housing scheme.

‘That was my first township experience,’ says Vivien.

The next time her father visited his daughters and saw where they were living, he promptly brought them back to Knysna. Vivien was eleven years old.

By then, her parents were living in Salt River.

Vivien remembers having only the most basic facilities in Salt River. Water for washing and cooking came from springs or tanks that collected rainwater in the winter months. Toilets were ‘long drops’ dug in the ground. Light came from lamps and candles, and food was cooked on wood-fired ovens and paraffin stoves. But the house was big and there was ample space to play.

Not that Vivien settled there for very long. Ever concerned about their daughters’ education, her parents sent her and her sister to stay with family friends in town so they could be closer to their school.

I stop her there. Until I read the Land Claims report the other day, I never knew that there were ever coloured people living in Knysna itself. Who were they? Where did they live?

Vivien starts listing the names of the families, ten surnames in total. She can still remember exactly where they lived, too, identifying the houses by the white people who live there now, or the shops they’ve become.

Vivien lived in one of those houses herself, but not for long. After two years her parents sent her away again, this time because there was no proper secondary school for coloured children in Knysna. So once again she found herself in Cape Town, this time living with an aunt who’d been able to afford to build her own house in a coloured township, giving her family more space than in the boxy, pre-built houses provided by the government.

At the time, Vivien’s parents still lived in Salt River and she spent every school holiday there.

She was in her second year of university when Hornlee first became ‘home’.

Vivien’s father had died by the time her mother was told she had to move to the coloured area because her house was now on white land. Like Vivien’s aunt in Cape Town, her mother was able to afford her own piece of land in the township and have a house built on it. But it was still a difficult transition.

‘You choose who you want to associate with,’ says Vivien, speaking generally. ‘So you know you get along with these people, but you don’t fancy those people for whatever reason. They’re the natural choices you make. But the thing about living in the townships then was that you had to live next to people who just didn’t understand you, and you didn’t understand them. You didn’t have the same outlook on life, you shared nothing.’

Schools were another issue, she says. When people all over South Africa were moved to places like Hornlee, there often weren’t schools for their children yet, or there’d be a primary school but no secondary school. As a result, many coloured children stopped going to school altogether.

‘And so you broke down a whole lot of people, not by making it intentionally difficult, but by not caring that it was difficult,’ says Vivien.

I ask her what the worst things were about living in the new township.

‘You were kind of… uprooted,’ she says. ‘But I don’t want to make an effort to say how bad it was. Because I didn’t really experience it as bad. Come to think of it, many things were better. We had water in the house; we didn’t have to pray for rain any more. We had flushing toilets, we had electricity. There were practical things that were better.’

Vivien still lives in Hornlee.

‘On the whole, now that I can live elsewhere – even if I had the money – I don’t think I would,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to have to go and get used to new things. It’s my home.’

I want to hear more about the removal in 1970. Was she there when her mother got the eviction notice in Salt River? Did she help her mother move? Did the local authorities help at all?

No, she wasn’t there, says Vivien. All she knew was that one holiday she was going home to Salt River, and the next she was going home to Hornlee.

‘If you want to know about the removals, you should speak to Ronnie,’ she says. ‘He’s got lots of stories.’

I find Ronnie Davidson in the workshop round the back of the Epilepsy South Africa home.

An ex-principal at a local farm school, Ronnie now supervises the residents where they do woodwork, needlework and gardening. Today they’re hammering together trellises and vegetable crates that they’ll sell for funding for the home.

Ronnie and I go into the workshop manager’s office where we’re relatively undisturbed except for the occasional face peering round the door to ask for toilet paper.

Like Vivien, Ronnie is coloured – although he feels no need to make that distinction any more. His identity is no longer attached to the colour of his skin.

Whereas Vivien’s family moved to Hornlee from Salt River in the west, Ronnie’s moved from Concordia, a forested area high in the hills north of Knysna town.

A keen storyteller, Ronnie is happy to talk about his childhood in Concordia in the 1960s, when his family lived on a piece of land ten, twenty hectares big.

‘Let’s be conservative and say it was ten hectares,’ he says. ‘That’s still twenty rugby fields.’

He tells me his family wasn’t wealthy by any means, but nor were they deprived. His father had a car, and they had electric lights in the house that were powered by a stack of car batteries charged by a wind-powered generator.

‘When those batteries were charged, you had light for two, three days,’ he says.

Water and sanitation were less sophisticated. Like Vivien, Ronnie spent many childhood hours cleaning roofs and gutters whenever it looked like it was going to rain. Another chore that fell to the Davidson children was cleaning the bucket toilet. A common sanitation system where running water wasn’t available, bucket toilets were housed in outbuildings with two doors: a front entrance and a small door at the back through which the bucket was removed to be emptied.

Ronnie laughs at the memory. To ward off the smells, they scattered ash from their wood-fired oven over the buckets. ‘It didn’t stink,’ he says. But when it came to emptying the buckets, it still wasn’t a pleasant chore.

‘On the yard, away from the house, we had to dig holes to empty the contents of the bucket into,’ says Ronnie. ‘Often. And we were a family of eight children.’

But overall, Ronnie says, they had a good life. He and his brothers and sisters grew up playing in forests and ravines where they set traps for birds, climbed trees and ate wild berries.

As idyllic as life was for a young coloured boy in Concordia, there was another reality awaiting Ronnie whenever he went into Knysna town.

Every time he and his brothers and sisters wanted to go to the cinema, or ‘bioscope’ as Ronnie calls it, they had to go to a matinée as there was a nine o’clock curfew. Any black or coloured people on the streets of Knysna after nine were chased out by the police.

They ran out of town, he says, to make it home in time.

When they did go to the bioscope, they had to sit on hard benches on a gallery, while the white people sat downstairs in soft seats.

The post office was even more segregated, with a separate entrance for black and coloured people away from the whites-only door. Once inside, the whites and ‘non-whites’ were separated by a latticed wall that gave them just a glimpse of how the other half lived.

Things didn’t get any better as Ronnie got older. If anything, they got worse. He remembers going away to college and having to change trains in George. At the station he had to change platforms, and there was a bridge over the tracks for just that purpose. ‘Everyone used that bridge, white and brown,’ he says. ‘But in 1970, they built a second bridge next to that bridge. Then we had to walk separately. In 1970, I tell you.’

When people started being removed to Hornlee, only some of the families in Concordia were singled out for the move. It hadn’t been declared a white group area, but some of the houses were in the way of a new bypass road that was being planned.

I’ve heard about this controversial bypass since I was a child. It still hasn’t materialised.

Ronnie remembers the day they realised their family had to move, ‘They drew a cross on our gate,’ he says. ‘A white cross.’

His mother, for one, was relieved to move to the township.

Ronnie’s mother had come to Knysna from Oudtshoorn in the Klein Karoo, a semi-desert region where she’d lived in a stone house in the middle of town long before the forced removals of later years. There she had grown up with proper electricity in the house from an early age. So living in Concordia with a wind charger and car batteries providing light, but not much more, had been a big change for her.

Having electricity in Hornlee was a big thing, says Ronnie. ‘My mother could buy a food mixer.’

But there were challenges as well. For his parents, Ronnie says, the biggest adjustment was financial.

‘There was suddenly a mortgage, and rates and taxes that were never there before. We used to bury our own sewage, burn our own rubbish. Now, all of a sudden, my parents had to pay to get it removed.’

Ronnie himself missed the space of Concordia. ‘I felt like I was stuck in the township with nothing around me,’ he says.

Many years later, when he had a son of his own, he took the boy to Concordia ‘just so he could experience what I had experienced’.